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Following in a growing line of eco-friendly data centers, Facebook announced on August 15th, 2017 that their newest center in New Albany, Ohio would be powered by renewable energy. The data center’s power sources would include “wind, hydroelectric, and solar power”, according to Facebook’s representative, Lindsay Amos. This New Albany branch is set to open in 2019, becoming the tenth data center for Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Network. Amos also added that, ultimately, the data center’s goal would be, “100 percent clean and renewable energy in our mix for our entire operations”.Read More

It’s no secret that technology consumers are currently ramping up their online connectivity. The Internet of Things (IoT), video streaming, and throughput for servers and storage have hugely increased bandwidth demands in data centers. At the same time, as bandwidth demands increase, data centers need to become even more creative in limiting their energy consumption. We’ve scoured the net to discover four innovative solutions to more efficiently power your data center. Read More

The US-Norwegian company Kolos has big plans for the tiny town of Ballangen, Norway, located near the Arctic Circle. There, on these icy grounds, they’re planning to build the world’s biggest data center. Once completed, this mammoth structure would require 1,000 megawatts of power to run with facilities spanning 600,000 square meters. Yet this immense project won’t reach its final stages for another 10 years at least! In the meantime, we’ll tell you what the future holds for Kolos’s gigantic data center. Read More

The global data center market is expected to be worth $14 billion by 2022 — it was valued at about $6 billion in 2016 — with no chance of slowing down anytime soon. Automation, Internet of Things devices, and machine learning systems are rapidly changing normal data center operations, making it difficult to predict what the industry will be like in the long-term. Because of this rapid growth and innovation, there is a high demand for data center engineers that are highly trained and have a variety of skills — skills that are beyond the industry norm. Read More

Last week, we filled you in on the cyber attack launched against HBO on July 31st, 2017, where unaired episodes, photos, and scripts were stolen. Remember how we reported that HBO’s email system was thought to be safe? Well, a week later, it turns out that it was also breached!

While HBO still believes that its entire email system wasn’t compromised, some distressing material has recently appeared online. Part of the hackers’ 1.5-terabyte data breach includes the Game of Thrones‘ stars personal details, which were allegedly lifted from company emails. Consequently, it seems that this cyber attack on America’s television giant may have hit much deeper than originally thought.

Since our first article, the HBO hackers have leaked more content online, including 37,977 email addresses, internal documents, and GoT’s fourth episode, “The Spoils of War”. As the weeks ahead progress, more data leaks are certainly anticipated. We’ll give you the full update below. Read More

Turns out, you weren’t the only ones eager for Game of Thrones spoilers. Of course, we hope you didn’t launch a 1.5 terabytes attack on HBO to get them! That’s exactly what happened on July 31st, 2017, when the network giant fell victim to a large-scale cyber crime. Experts are already saying HBO’s data breach is larger than even the devastating attacks on Sony in 2014. In fact, it’s expected to have been about seven times bigger! Keep reading to learn more about the situation at HBO, including what the hackers have stolen and already leaked online. Read More

As data centers grow worldwide — in both number and physical size — over the coming years, will employment opportunities also grow? Unfortunately, the increase in data centers doesn’t necessarily mean an increase in employment opportunities. In fact, major data center operations are now hiring fewer data center engineers, instead choosing to monitor the data center through smart technology and machine learning technology.

Smart technology is able to monitor the data center’s environment, such as the cooling and heating of the room — keeping the right temperature is especially crucial during warmer months, in order to keep maintenance costs down — in addition to monitoring the data center’s power, which is more of an issue during warmer months when power outages are likelier. While smart technology can sense many issues in the environment, it still can’t catch all issues, nor can it analyze the data that it collects. That’s where machine learning technology comes in by combining with Internet of Things devices in order to analyze video and sounds to help prevent data center issues. Read More

Ever dreamed of going to school for data center engineering? If you apply by August 31st, 2017, you could be one of the world’s first students to join such a Bachelor’s program. Offered by the Institute of Technology in Sligo, Ireland, this two-year university degree is the first of its kind. It was created to help data centers find talented candidates, who are fresh out of school but already armed with the necessary skills and on-the-job training. The Institute of Technology says they created the program after eighteen months of consultations with world-class companies, including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Chances are, this B.Eng degree should come in handy to those lucky participants. Read More

Over the last few years, conflicting reports have been released on whether data breaches affect the stock value of companies. The question at the center of this debate remains: “If my American business suffers a cyberattack, will its value plummet on Wall Street?” The Harvard Business Review issued a staunch “no” back in 2015, but new findings made by Comparitech are showing that there’s more to the story. Comparitech discovered that stock prices are lowered, both after the initial public reveal and throughout the years to come. Read More

If the recent photo leaks of Hollywood celebrities have taught us anything, it’s that cloud systems aren’t secure places for storing data. Indeed, don’t think for a second that A-listers are the only Americans being impacted by these cyber crimes. Many people store personal, confidential data in their clouds, which makes them a tempting target. Hackers could easily gain access to your online storage too if you don’t take the proper safety precautions. While there isn’t a way to guarantee that your data are totally secure, we’ll tell you the best methods to help safeguard your cloud. Read More